Archived news and commentary: August 29 - September 4, 2005

2005/08/29 - 2005/09/04
2005/08/22 - 2005/08/28
2005/08/15 - 2005/08/21
2005/08/08 - 2005/08/14
2005/08/01 - 2005/08/07
2005/07/25 - 2005/07/31

› From 2001/09/11 -

Sunday, September 4, 2005

News and commentary:

"A wall in infamous Haifa Street..."
(Hadi Mizban, AP, 2005/09/03)
"A wall in infamous Haifa Street is covered with pictures of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, in Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005. Iraqi authorities have set Oct. 19 as the date for the start of the trial of Saddam Hussein, an official said."

"Mandarins in a mess" (Nick Cohen, The Observer, 2005/09/04)
"Livingstone appears to be the greatest hypocrite in modern politics: a 'left winger' who ducks the challenge when faced with misogyny, homophobia, theocracy and the slaughter of innocents. But he probably believes he is being consistent.
Livingstone comes from the far left and recruited nearly all his advisers from a minuscule Trotskyist faction which gathered around the Socialist Action newspaper. They were 'third worldists', as we used to say, activists who had despaired of the British working class ever obeying the orders of their Leninist betters and therefore supported any movement in the Third World, however barbaric, as long as it said it was socialist.
What is new is that since the death of socialism, they are prepared to indulge the extreme religious right as long at it is anti-American. The reflex is essentially the same, as is the delusion that these are in some way 'progressive' forces.
Now it seems the fantasy has spread to the Foreign Office. Documents obtained by this newspaper show that the mandarins have been preparing for an accommodation with radical Islam. ...
Unfortunately, history shows that Walter Mitty can't match the wishful thinking of a 'foreign policy realist'. The leaked papers show FO mandarins in a land of make-believe. Running through this thinking is an aching need to believe that Qaradawi is a liberal, a peculiar liberal, no doubt, but still a man with whom Britain can do business. ...
Pompous journalists like to pretend that we 'tell Truth to Power'. Actually, our job is to tell Truth to readers. We assume that Power knows Truth and, shockingly, is covering it up. Far more shocking is the realisation that Power wouldn't recognise Truth if it slapped it in the face and knocked it to the ground."

"Revealed: MI6 plan to infiltrate extremists" (Martin Bright, The Observer, 2005/09/04)
"British intelligence officers planned a 'black propaganda' campaign against Islamic extremists, infiltrating their groups through the internet, documents leaked to The Observer reveal.
Details of the proposals, contained in a letter from the head of the intelligence arm of the Foreign Office, will cause widespread alarm within government.
The letter reveals that the FCO planned to spread anti-Western propaganda as a way of gaining the trust of Islamic extremists and then arguing that violence was not the way forward. ...
Officials within the Foreign Office are known to be unhappy about the growing 'Islamisation' of the department and many feel uncomfortable with moves across Whitehall to open up a dialogue with radical Islamists. However, ministers believe it makes sense to engage with the more moderate fringes of political Islam. ...
A second document seen by The Observer will further fuel concerns of increasing 'Islamist' influence in the Foreign Office. The memo from Mockbul Ali, the FCO's Islamic issues adviser, recommends allowing the radical Qatari-based cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi into Britain. Qaradawi has consistently supported suicide bombers in Palestine and armed resistance to coalition forces in Iraq. The Observer reported last weekend that the scholar had said that martyrdom was a 'duty' of Muslims in Iraq and Palestine.
The memo of 14 July, a week after the London suicide bombings, reveals that the director-general (political) of the Foreign Office, John Sawers, agreed the line to support a visa application from al-Qaradawi.
The memo contains the warning that refusing Qaradawi entry could lead to further terrorist attacks.
'Exclusion ... could turn Muslim opinion further against the UK and encourage some to move to violence against British targets.'"

"Tape links Al-Qaeda to London" (Jonathan Calvert and Nick Fielding, The Sunday Times, 2005/09/04)
"Last week investigators were sticking to their belief that there was no overseas mastermind behind the attacks. But independent experts were less guarded, stating that the new video bears all the hallmarks of an Al-Qaeda production and exhibits striking similarities with previous tapes. ...
There is a consensus among experts that the tape was given to Al-Jazeera by the Al-Qaeda leadership as new footage of Ayman al-Zawahiri, second in command to Bin Laden, also appears on it.
Al-Zawahiri’s claim that the London bombings were a direct response to Britain’s role in Iraq is calculated to reignite Tony Blair’s difficulties over the war.
Khan, however, makes no direct reference to Iraq. Instead he talks about avenging the deaths of Muslims inflicted by western governments. Neither does he say he is acting for Al-Qaeda, although he does praise its leaders as “heroes”.
This would be consistent with one theory being posited by the intelligence services that Khan was not being directed by Al-Qaeda but that the group had somehow managed to acquire his video so as to bolster its fearsome reputation.Other terrorism experts who have studied the video say that Khan’s section bears many of the hallmarks of an Al-Qaeda production. ...
Significantly, Khan’s video and all three of the 9/11 films were made by the Al Sahab video media production company, an underground Al-Qaeda entity that has produced the terror group’s 12 known videos." (See also: "New Al-Jazeera Videos: London Suicide Bomber Before 'Entering Gardens of Paradise,' and Ayman Al-Zawahiri's Threats of More Bombings in the West" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 979, 2005/09/02))

"Mubarak lights a democratic flame" (Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times, 2005/09/04)
"There could not have been more of a contrast on the campaign trail last week. Hosni Mubarak, who after four terms is facing his first multi-candidate presidential election, read his speech to a partisan crowd from behind a cordon of twitchy security men. At an opposition rally, his main rival called for change and was hoisted on the shoulders of ecstatic young men.
The 77-year-old Mubarak, wearing a light grey suit and a white shirt open at the collar — his one concession to the young technocrats on his campaign who are trying to soften his image — arrived in the town of Zagaziq hours late for 10,000 supporters sitting in the stifling heat of a huge tent. ...
They interrupted his speech with chants of “Nam, Mubarak” (Yes, Mubarak), recalling the system by which presidents have been elected since King Farouk was overthrown by a revolution in 1952. Parliament nominates a president, always the incumbent, and he submits to a yes-or-no referendum. Mubarak has won four of those. ...
Many have seen Mubarak — his hair dyed black but looking surprisingly vigorous for his years — in the flesh for the first time. He used to remain aloof in his office. When candidates such as Ayman Nour, head of the liberal El-Ghad party, started touring the country, Mubarak’s advisers said that he had better get out there as well.
It has not been the most comfortable experience for the former fighter pilot. After a few trips to face sweating citizens, Mubarak is said to have told a friend: 'It is as if I own my house and now I have to bid for it at auction.'"

"Anti-US bloggers hail Katrina" (AFP/The Courier Mail, 2005/09/04)
Katrina VIII: "Hurricane Katrina has incited a storm of enthusiasm among Islamist bloggers who claim the destruction was sent by God to torment the American empire.
"Katrina, a soldier sent by God to fight on our side... the soldier Katrina joins us to fight against America," said one Islamist web site.
Another said: "Allahu akbar (God is greatest). Soldiers of God, Hurricane Katrina demolishes America. Don't think that God doesn't care about the injustices of tyrants."
Internet sites published dozens of photos showing crumbled buildings, overturned cars, flooded streets, devastated oil refineries, residents wading through muck and water and US flags ripped to shreds by the hurricane that wreaked havoc in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
The pictures should "serve as a lesson," one blogger said. ...
Islamist web sites had also cast blame on South Asian countries hit by last year's tsunami that killed more than 125,000 people, saying "the hand of God" was involved.
Back then, one scribe described the tsunami as 'divine vengeance against Thailand, a country of debauchery.'"

Saturday, September 3, 2005

News and commentary:

"People look on..."
(Sergei Venyavsky, AP, 2005/09/03)
"People look on during a rally in the memory of hundreds of adults and children, who perished Sept. 3, 2004 in Beslan's school hostage taking, in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, 1,000 km (600 miles) south of Moscow, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005. Russians on Saturday marked the anniversary of one of country's deadliest terrorist attacks with prayers and solidarity actions."

"Beslan mourns with tolling bell, doves" (Oliver Bullough, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/09/03)
"Residents of the Russian town of Beslan, blaming authorities and still seething with anger, grieved silently on Saturday to mark the day a year ago when hundreds of their children were killed in a school siege.
President Vladimir Putin, who met Beslan parents on Friday to hear their accounts, on Saturday ordered prosecutors from Moscow to check official failings and chaos at the end of the siege by pro-Chechen militants that ended in a bloodbath.
Tearful residents held a minute's silence after filing through the town's shattered school on Saturday, adding wreaths to a vast floral memorial to the 331 people who died, mostly in an explosion, fire and shooting on the final day of the siege.
A list of the dead took 22 minutes to be read out and the streets of the town were empty with more than 12,000 people gathered for the final ceremony of three days of mourning. ...
A broad swathe of red carnations ran down the middle of the school's blackened sports hall, where the more than 1,000 children and parents were held by armed guerrillas demanding an independent
Chechnya.
"This marks the place where the terrorists walked so we covered it in flowers so that no one would walk on it," said Svetlana Psgoyeva, who lost her granddaughter in the siege, which came to a chilling end a year ago on Saturday.
"Our children will be looking down on us from heaven and they would be scared to see someone walking on that place," she said.
Photographs of the dead, more than half of them children, smiled down on weeping mothers who pressed their faces against the pictures of their loved ones."

"Survivors describe week of horror in New Orleans" (Paul Simao, Reuters/My Way, 2005/09/03)
Katrina VII: "Thousands of New Orleans residents streamed north on Saturday, escaping the violence that gripped the city in the days after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
Women spoke of the terror they felt as gangs of thieves and rapists roamed the streets and temporary shelters night after night, plucking victims -- some of them children -- at whim and with no fear of police intervention.
"They took what they wanted and nobody stopped them," said Tanika James, 27, who was among a large group of refugees who arrived in Baton Rouge and other parts of Louisiana on Friday. "It was the most scared I (have) been."
Like many of the 6,000 hurricane survivors who have sought shelter at a domed arena in Lafayette in southwestern Louisiana, Michael Davis, 18, said the orgy of violence that erupted in the state's largest city had left him with a numbing sense of loss.
"The New Orleans I knew ain't no more," Davis said.
"There were bodies floating everywhere. Lots of them. Some had bullets in them," Davis said, as he described his escape from a neighborhood that was immersed in more than 10 feet (3 metres) of water earlier this week."

"From the murky water of doubt emerges an uncomfortable truth" (David Aaronovitch, The Times, 2005/09/03)
Katrina V: "Then there’s the inevitable Iraq connection, which broadly suggests that you can’t have a military occupation and deal with a natural disaster at the same time (which, if true, is a bit of a problem for the UN). The sophisticated version of this proposition is that the National Guard, who would have rescued everyone, quelled the looting and stopped up the dykes are all in Iraq. The New York Times, in the above-mentioned editorial, entitled “A man-made disaster”, took this view.
Fine, except that in the very same edition it was carefully explained to a reporter that there were, in fact, thousands of National Guard folk around. A National Guard senior officer even told The NYT: “It is not a function of more people, but how many people can you move on the road system that exists now in Louisiana and in Mississippi,” and asked rhetorically: “How many people can you put through that funnel where a storm has taken four-lane highways and turned them into goat trails?” The goat trail question was not addressed in the editorial. ...
The truth is that the New Orleans disaster is far worse than 9/11, and dwarfs anything seen in the West in modern times save for the Etna eruption and the San Francisco earthquake. In that sense it only tells us how vulnerable we are.
Well, not all of us equally. When disasters or fires or bombings happen, you discover just who was travelling on your trains, who was crammed into your hostels or who was living in the low-lying areas. It isn’t the failure to act in New Orleans that is the story here, it’s the sheer, uninsured, uncared for, self-disenfranchised scale of the poverty that lies revealed. It looks like a scene from the Third World because that’s the truth. It’s a quiet disaster that’s been going on for years — a pudding-basin-full-of-poverty situation."

Friday, September 2, 2005

News and commentary:

 

"Milvertha Hendricks, 84, center waits in the rain..."
(Eric Gay, AP, 2005/09/02)
"Milvertha Hendricks, 84, center waits in the rain with other flood victims outside the convention center in New Orleans, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005."
[More photos by Eric Gay at Yahoo! News.]

"Murder and mayhem in New Orleans' miserable shelter" (Mark Egan, Reuters/Yahoo! News, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/09/02)
Katrina V: "NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - With the rotors of President George W. Bush's helicopter sounding overhead, New Orleans' poor and downtrodden recounted tales of murder, rape, death threats and near starvation since Hurricane Katrina wrecked this city.
Ending days of abandonment since the hurricane struck on Monday, the U.S. National Guard handed out military rations and a bottle of water to thousands of evacuees -- the first proper meal most had eaten in days.
But as the masses lined up outside, herded by Army troops toting machine guns, inside the convention center where these people slept since Monday was the stench of death and decay.
Leroy Fouchea, 42, waited in the sweltering heat for an hour to get his ration -- his first proper food since Monday -- and immediately handed it over to a sickly friend.
He then offered to show reporters the dead bodies of a man in a wheelchair, a young man who he said he dragged inside just hours earlier, and the limp forms of two infants, one just four months old, the other six months old.
"They died right here, in America, waiting for food," Fouchea said as he walked toward Hall D, where the bodies were put to get them out of the searing heat."

"British Muslims Shocked by Video of Bomber" (Robert Barr, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/09/02)
"British Muslims in several areas said Friday they felt profound shock watching a video of a London suicide bomber seeking to justify the carnage — erasing any doubt a homegrown cell carried out the July 7 attack and that its members were inspired by al-Qaida.
For one of his friends, the sight of purported ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan — speaking in a Yorkshire accent and wearing a red-and-white keffiyeh in the farewell message broadcast on al-Jazeera — verged on the surreal.
"We were all shocked and horrified when we saw the video itself," Irshad Hussain said in this gritty northern city where Khan grew up. "We are just devastated for what we had just heard and what we had seen on TV. ... I couldn't believe it was actually him talking on the screen."
Khan's farewell message was broadcast Thursday alongside a video of al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, warning of more attacks.
Labour Party lawmaker Shahid Malik — a Muslim who represents the Dewsbury neighborhood in West Yorkshire where Khan had lived since February — told the BBC that the tape would put to rest rumors that he and the three other bombers were somehow set up.
"There is a hardcore rump within the British Muslim community that didn't actually believe somehow that Sidique and his cohorts were responsible," Malik said. 'Rampant conspiracy theories mushroomed out of control.'" (See also: "New Al-Jazeera Videos: London Suicide Bomber Before 'Entering Gardens of Paradise,' and Ayman Al-Zawahiri's Threats of More Bombings in the West" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 979, 2005/09/02))

"Susanna Dudiyeva..."
(Ivan Sekretarev, AP, 2005/09/02)
"Susanna Dudiyeva, center, head of Beslan Mother's Committee, addresses to the media as other unidentified members stand behind shortly after their arrival from Moscow in Beslan late Friday, Sept. 2, 2005. A group of mothers and other relatives of victims of the Beslan school seizure held a long-anticipated meeting with President Vladimir Putin, and they said after wards that the talks were difficult, but Putin provided them with hope that justice would be done."
(See also: "Beslan mothers: Putin is culpable" (Fred Weir, The Christian Science Monitor, 2005/08/29))

"Dove Tale" (Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, 2005/09/02)
"In the lead-up to war, almost nobody suggested that Iraq had completely given up its WMD programs. While U.S. intelligence agencies did not bear out the alarmist interpretation peddled by the Bush administration, they -- along with the major European intelligence agencies -- believed that Iraq still harbored biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear program. Ted Kennedy believed it. ("The biological and chemical weapons Saddam has are not new. He has possessed them for more than a decade.") The New York Times editorial page believed it. ("What really counts in this conflict ... is the destruction of Iraq's unconventional weapons and the dismantling of its program to develop nuclear arms.") There was no good reason not to believe it. Saddam had spent a decade thwarting weapons inspectors and paid an enormous economic price for doing so. Moreover, on two previous occasions (after the Gulf war and in 1995), Western intelligence discovered that they had been underestimating Iraq's WMD capability.
It's this moderate liberal critique that didn't hold together. These Iraq doves conceded that Iraq had a serious WMD program and conceded that letting Saddam acquire a nuclear weapon would be a disaster. Yet they assumed, against all evidence, that the rest of the U.N. Security Council had a good-faith interest in enforcing effective containment and that measures short of war would persuade Saddam to abandon his WMD deterrent. We now know that Saddam was so determined to keep his neighbors and his own people guessing about his WMD capability that he endured a full invasion rather than openly disarm. The moderate Iraq dove analysis, if anything, looks far worse in light of what we now know. It just happens that the moderate doves were bailed out for reasons they didn't foresee."

"After the Katrina tragedy, the looters come with their lies and half-truths" (Gerard Baker, The Times, 2005/09/02)
Katrina IV: "And then came the predictable exploitation of the tragedy for political purposes, the dishonest advancing of an ideological agenda. This represents a sort of intellectual looting, in which the perpetrators help themselves selectively to convenient facts for their own delectation, sidestepping the dead and dispossessed before making off with their meretricious spoils.
In Katrina’s case, the intellectual looters have busied themselves with plundering half-truths and false analyses to advance one of their most precious agendas: global warming.
The German Environment Minister, Jurgen Trittin, was first, with a claim that this was a real-life version of the shock-flick, The Day After Tomorrow. Sir David King, Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, weighed in, saying global warming was increasing the risk from hurricanes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, self-designated leader of the American environmentalist cause, said the US was reaping the failure to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol. And, of course, Cindy Sheehan, the bereaved mother of a US soldier who leads the antiwar campaign and any other left-wing cause that wants her, noted President Bush was “heading to Louisiana to see the devastation that his environmental policies and his killing policies have caused”.
Best of all, though, was the contribution of Jon Snow, enthroned as the objective voice of British media at Channel 4 News, who chortled: “How ironic that the world’s No 1 polluter is now reaping the ‘rewards’ that so many have warned would flow.”
The only fitting response to that statement is a moment’s silence to reflect on the mendacity and inhumanity of it. But the problem with these claims is that, delivered ex cathedra to credulous audiences, they quickly become received wisdom, so we must take a moment to incinerate them.
There’s no evidence, in fact, of any increase in either the frequency or the intensity of hurricanes since Man has been polluting the atmosphere."

"A Sensible Iraqi Constitution" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2005/09/02)
"All constitutions have their "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots." In America, the Constitution proper says what the government can and should do. The Bill of Rights says what the government cannot and must not do -- impose religion, force confessions, search and seize. It is the "thou shalt nots" that are your protection from tyranny.
The constitution writers in Iraq finessed the question of Islam by posing it as a thou-shalt-not. No law may contradict Islam. But it also says that no law may contradict democratic principles and that the constitution accepts all human rights conventions.
This means that there are two gatekeepers for the passing of any law. Insofar as the constitution is adhered to -- a heretofore dubious assumption in that part of the world -- democratic rights are protected from the imposition of sharia. Establishing a double roadblock to new legislation is an excellent way to launch Iraq's first experiment with limited government. ...
We went into Iraq knowing that we were going to overturn the political order. The introduction of democracy would inevitably take power away from the former ruling community -- the 20 percent of the population that ruled with uncommon brutality -- and transfer it to the other 80 percent. That the previously victimized 80 percent should not wish to be held hostage to the political demands of their former oppressors should hardly be a surprise. Nonetheless, they still managed to produce a perfectly reasonable constitutional document that deserves far more respect than it has received from the knee-jerk critics here at home."

"New Al-Jazeera Videos: London Suicide Bomber Before 'Entering Gardens of Paradise,' and Ayman Al-Zawahiri's Threats of More Bombings in the West" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 979, 2005/09/02)
"The following are excerpts from a videotaped message, in English, from suicide bomber Mohammed Sadiq, who participated in the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London. Al-Jazeera TV aired this message on September 1, 2005. ...
The video began with the title of the speaker as follows: "The Martyr Mohammed Sadiq, one of the knights of the blessed raids on London Sadiq:"
"Praise be to Allah, blessings and prayers upon His Prophet. I'm going to keep this short and to the point because it's all been said before by far more eloquent people than me, and our words have no impact upon you, therefore I'm going to talk to you in a language that you understand. Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood. ...
"I, and thousands like me, have forsaken everything for what we believe. Our driving motivation doesn't come from tangible commodities that this world has to offer. Our religion is Islam – obedience to the one true God, Allah, and following in the footsteps of the final Prophet and Messenger, Muhammad, Allah's blessings and prayers upon him. This is how our ethical stances are dictated.
"Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world, and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security, you will be our targets, and until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment, and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight.
"We are at war, and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation. I myself, I make du'ah to Allah, to raise me amongst those whom I love, like the Prophets, the Messengers, and the martyrs, and today's heroes, like our beloved Sheikh Osama bin Laden, Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and Abu Mus'ab Al-Zarqawi, and all the other brothers and sisters who are fighting in Allah's cause.
'With this I leave you to make up your own minds, and ask you to make du'ah to Allah Almighty to accept the work from me and my brothers and to enter us into the gardens of Paradise.'"

Thursday, September 1, 2005

News and commentary:

"This is a video grab..."
(AP/Al Jazeera, 2005/09/01)
"This is a video grab taken from the pan-Arab televison TV channel Al Jazeera and aired on Thursday Sept. 1, 2005, that allegedly shows Mohammed Sidique Khan who was allegedly one of the suicide bombers of the July 7, 2005 attacks in London. Al-Qaida has claimed responsibility for the July 7 bombings in London, and has threatened more attacks in Europe, the pan-Arab television channel Al-Jazeera broadcast Thursday."

"Video: Al-Qaida Behind London Blasts" (Sally Buzbee, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/09/01)
"Al-Qaida's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri, claimed responsibility for the July 7 London bombings in a video aired Thursday on Al-Jazeera that included a farewell statement by a man identified as one of the four suicide attackers.
It was the first explicit claim of responsibility for the blasts by the terrorist group headed by Osama bin Laden.
Al-Zawahri, who is thought to be hiding along the rugged Afghan-Pakistani border, threatened the West with "more catastrophes" in retaliation for the policies of President Bush and British Prime Minister
Tony Blair.
The Al-Jazeera newscaster who presented the al-Zawahri tape said it contained a "testament" by one of the suicide bombers who attacked the London transport system on July 7, killing 56 people.
Speaking with a heavy Yorkshire accent, the bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan, said he was inspired by al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, al-Zawahri and the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi.
"Until you will stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight," said Khan, wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh and a dark jacket. "We are at war, and I am a soldier and now you too will taste the reality of this situation." ...
"I talk to you today about the blessed London battle which came as a slap to the face of the tyrannical, crusader British arrogance," al-Zawahri said. "It's a sip from the glass that the Muslims have been drinking from."
'This blessed battle has transferred — like its glorious predecessors in New York, Washington, and Madrid — the battle to the enemies' land, after many centuries of the battle being on our (Muslim) land and after (Western) troops have occupied our land in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine.'"

"Rushdie on Today" (butterfliesandwheels.com, 2005/09/01)
"I've transcribed some of that chat with Salman Rushdie on 'Today' last Monday, because he said several excellent things, worth preserving.
First he was asked his opinion of Muslim 'leaders'...

[Rushdie:] Well for a start I'm not sure how much of a 'leader' these people are - it's interesting - sort of a moot point about how many people actually follow them. But I think the mistake is to see these people as being somehow the voice of moderation. Sacranie and his deputy Banglawala have been very very vociferously hard-line on a range of issues for a long long time, and I think the Panorama programme kind of exposed that. ...
Today: You've also been quite critical of the Prime Minister for relying on people of that kind in the fight against terrorism.
Rushdie [earnestly]: Yeah, I think it's a very bad mistake - I think if you look in the papers right now, you have a two thirds majority of the British people objecting to the introduction of faith-based schools and yet that's an absolutely central plank of the government's policy. If he thinks that more religion is going to solve the problem, then not only is he in my view wrong, but he's also seriously out of step with the country.
Today: Change has to come from within the Islamic community.
Rushdie: Yeah I think that's right, but the point I'm trying to make is that even to describe it as 'the Islamic community' is in a way to go down the road of communal politics. It's important to see that for most people of Muslim belief or Muslim origin in this country, they have a range of political and social interests which have nothing to do with whether or not they're religious, and it's that ordinary political agenda which needs to emerge amd be concentrated on, rather than this kind of faith-based approach."

(Hat tip: Harry's Place. See also: "A question of Leadership" (BBC News, 2005/08/21))

"Pentagon Finds More Who Recall Atta Intel" (Robert Burns, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/09/01)
"Pentagon officials said Thursday they have found three more people who recall an intelligence chart that identified Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta as a terrorist one year before the attacks on New York and Washington. But they have been unable to find the chart or other evidence that it existed.
Last month, two military officers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Philpott, went public with claims that a secret unit code-named Able Danger used data mining — searching large amounts of data for patterns — to identify Atta in 2000. Shaffer has said three other Sept. 11 hijackers also were identified.
In recent days Pentagon officials have said they could not yet verify or disprove the assertions by Shaffer and Philpott. On Thursday, four intelligence officials provided the first extensive briefing for reporters on the outcome of their interviews with people associated with Able Danger and their review of documents.
They said they interviewed at least 80 people over a three-week period and found three, besides Philpott and Shaffer, who said they remember seeing a chart that either mentioned Atta by name as an al-Qaida operative or showed his photograph. Four of the five recalled a chart with a pre-9/11 photo of Atta; the other person recalled only a reference to his name."

"Europe for revolution" (Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian, 2005/09/01)
"Solidarnosc pioneered a new model of regime change to be proud of":
"For what the shipyard workers began in August 1980 was a fundamental redefinition of what we mean by revolution, supplanting the old model of violent overthrow that had prevailed for nearly two centuries since the French revolution began in 1789. We might call it the Jacobin-Bolshevik model: storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace; executing the king or the tsar; a festival of popular liberation turning to terror, as the revolution devours its children. I remember vividly how Solidarnosc and its advisers consciously drew lessons from this history, and from the more recent experience of failed uprisings against Soviet rule. The Polish dissident Adam Michnik explained: we have learned from history that those who start by storming the Bastille will end up building their own Bastilles.
Instead, they tried a new model: peaceful, self-limiting, evolutionary, negotiated revolution. No one yet called it velvet revolution - that had to wait until Prague in 1989 - but that is what it was: the first velvet revolution. ...
Like the original Jacobin-Bolshevik version, it's a model made in Europe. These days, the Bush administration is rather aggressively pushing the idea of spreading velvet revolutions - now sometimes called "colour revolutions" - not just to the last remaining European dictatorship, Belarus, but also to countries in the Middle East. How should Europeans react? The last thing we should do, I think, is to leave talking of freedom entirely to Americans. After all, Solidarnosc is just one of many cases where Europeans have been on the front line in fighting for freedom. But fighting by peaceful means."

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

News and commentary:

"Shoes and other belongings of the victims..."
(Hadi Mizban, AP, 2005/08/31)
"Shoes and other belongings of the victims are seen on the bridge over the Tigris river, in Baghdad, Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005. A railing collapsed Wednesday on a bridge packed with Shiite worshippers marching in a religious procession, sending crowds tumbling into the Tigris River."

"769 Dead, 307 Hurt in Iraq Bridge Stampede" (Qassim Abdul-Zahra, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/08/31)
"Trampled, crushed against barricades or plunging into the Tigris River, more than 700 Shiite pilgrims died Wednesday when a procession across a Baghdad bridge was engulfed in panic over rumors that a suicide bomber was at large.
Most of the dead were women and children, Interior Ministry spokesman Lt. Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman said. It was the single biggest confirmed loss of life in
Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Dr. Swadi Karim of the Health Ministry operations section said 769 were killed and 307 injured.
Tensions already had risen among the Shiite marchers because of a mortar attack two hours earlier near the shrine where they were heading. Then the crowd was slowed by barriers about a quarter of the way across the Two Imams Bridge, Interior Minister Bayn Jabr said on state-run TV.
"Pushing started when a rumor was spread by a terrorist who claimed that there was a person with an explosive belt, which caused panic and the pushing started," Jabr said. "Some fell from the bridge, others fell on the barricades" and were trampled to death."

"Kicking Hurricane Victims While They're Down" (Claus Christian Malzahn, Der Spiegel, 2005/08/31)
Katrina III: "Hurricane Katrina has cost the lives of hundreds and devastated the US Gulf Coast. But instead of aid donations and sympathy, the Americans have heard little more than a haughty "I told you so" from Germany. It's another low point for trans-Atlantic relations -- and set off by a German minister. How pathetic. ...
Apparently the Americans had it coming: "The American president has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina -- in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures -- can visit on his country." Who wrote this? None other than Jürgen Trittin, Germany's minister of the environment.
At a moment when the dead on the Gulf Coast are still being counted, the German minister of the environment could think of nothing better to do than -- in an essay published Tuesday in the center-left daily Frankfurter Rundschau -- to blame the US itself for the catastrophe. The piece is 493 words long, and not a single one of them is wasted to express any sort of sympathy for the victims of the storm. The worst of it is that Trittin isn't alone with his cold, malicious tenor. The coverage from much of the German media tends in the same direction: If Bush had only listened to Uncle Trittin and signed the Kyoto Protocol, then this never would have happened." (See also: "Katrina Should be A Lesson To US on Global Warming" (Der Spiegel, 2005/08/30))

"Invasion of the Isolationists" (Francis Fukuyama, The New York Times, 2005/08/31)
"In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans would have allowed President Bush to lead them in any of several directions, and the nation was prepared to accept substantial risks and sacrifices. The Bush administration asked for no sacrifices from the average American, but after the quick fall of the Taliban it rolled the dice in a big way by moving to solve a longstanding problem only tangentially related to the threat from Al Qaeda - Iraq. In the process, it squandered the overwhelming public mandate it had received after Sept. 11. At the same time, it alienated most of its close allies, many of whom have since engaged in "soft balancing" against American influence, and stirred up anti-Americanism in the Middle East.
The Bush administration could instead have chosen to create a true alliance of democracies to fight the illiberal currents coming out of the Middle East. It could also have tightened economic sanctions and secured the return of arms inspectors to Iraq without going to war. It could have made a go at a new international regime to battle proliferation. All of these paths would have been in keeping with American foreign policy traditions. But Mr. Bush and his administration freely chose to do otherwise. ...
We do not know what outcome we will face in Iraq. We do know that four years after 9/11, our whole foreign policy seems destined to rise or fall on the outcome of a war only marginally related to the source of what befell us on that day. There was nothing inevitable about this. There is everything to be regretted about it."

"Australia-hating Muslims unchecked, says teacher" (Geoff Strong, The Age, 2005/08/31)
Tolerating intolerance. The warning signs are the same in Malmö, Sweden, as they are in Melbourne, Australia:
"The warning signs were apparent to Chris Doig at least 10 years ago. A small group of the teacher's students made it clear they despised Australia, regarding it as a degenerate culture to be disrupted and ultimately swept aside.
Two Muslim students danced with joy after the September 11 attacks in the United States. Other students told him these attitudes came out of ideas picked up at Melbourne's northern suburbs mosques.
The teacher says he tried to voice concern to his school administration, to the Education Department bureaucracy, even to senior political figures in his own Labor Party, but his warnings were ignored.
The school was Moreland City College in Coburg, which closed at the end of last year when enrolments fell to 270, from a high of 1000 a decade before. The official reason for the closure was that community confidence had fallen, particularly after adverse media reports when students vandalised mini-buses belonging to the neighbouring Yooralla Society. ...
Mr Doig isn't claiming his former students were potential bombers, or that their behaviour was entirely to do with their religious views, but he is concerned that some of their attitudes were so hostile to Australian culture that their behaviour descended frequently to violence. He is especially critical of what he says was a faint-hearted response from the school and the educational hierarchy and what he claims was their tolerance of intolerable behaviour and attitudes. ...
About half the students at the school were Muslim, and Mr Doig says the vast majority were respectful and well behaved. The troublemakers, he says, made up no more than 5 per cent. Most were the Australian-born children of parents who had come from a handful of small neighbouring villages in Lebanon during the civil war that raged from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.
"Some of these were so disruptive and even violent that staff and other students abandoned the school when they could." He said he was threatened with stabbing and had to call the police three times." (See also: "They deserve something better" (Jihad i Malmö, 2005/06/10))

Added in archive:
"How to Win in Iraq" (Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., Foreign Affairs, from the September/October 2005 issue)
"Winning in Iraq" (David Brooks, The New York Times, 2005/08/28)
"Bush vs. the Mother" (Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, 2005/08/25)

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

News and commentary:

"A view of Canal Street..."
(Rick Wilking, Reuters, 2005/08/30)
"A view of Canal Street that is flooded with water in New Orleans August 30, 2005. The historic city of New Orleans was steadily filling with water from nearby Lake Ponchartrain on Tuesday after its defenses were breached by the ferocity of hurricane Katrina."

"Wrath Without God?" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2005/08/30)
Katrina II: "In 1998 the city fathers of Orlando, Fla., decided to hang rainbow flags from lampposts in honor of Disney World's "gay day." Zany televangelist Pat Robertson issued an admonition: "I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you."
Say what you will about the secular left, at least its adherents aren't prone to such superstitions. Or are they? In today's Boston Globe, a column by Ross Gelbspan blames hurricane Katrina on the wrath of -- well, whatever you call a vengeful higher power in the absence of God:

The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.
When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.
When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the driver was global warming. ...

Over on the Puffington Host, one Robert F. Kennedy Jr. echoes the point:

Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence. . . . Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and -- now -- Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

The gratuitous nod to antiwar hysteria almost makes us think this guy is related to the senior senator from Massachusetts.
A dose of reality comes from (of all places) the New York Times, which notes that severe hurricanes are simply a fact of life:

Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.
But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught "is very much natural," said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season."

(See also: "Katrina's real name" (Ross Gelbspan, The Boston Globe, 2005/08/30), "'For They That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind'" (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Huffington Post, 2005/08/30) and "Storms Vary With Cycles, Experts Say" (Kenneth Chang, The New York Times, 2005/08/30))

"Katrina Should be A Lesson To US on Global Warming" (Der Spiegel, 2005/08/30)
Katrina I: "Seems like everything is President Bush's fault. One day after Katrina hammered the Gulf Coast, German commentators are laying into the US for its stubborn attitude to global warming and Kyoto. ...
The toughest commentary of the day comes from Germany's Environmental Minister, Jürgen Trittin, a Green Party member, who takes space in the Frankfurter Rundschau, a paper owned by the Social Democrats, to bash US President George W. Bush's environmental laxity. He begins by likening the photos and videos of the hurricane stricken areas to scenes from a Roland Emmerich sci-fi film and insists that global warming and climate change are making it ever more likely that storms and floods will plague America and Europe. "There is only one possible route of action," he writes. "Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced and it has to happen worldwide. Until now, the US has kept its eyes shut to this emergency. (Americans) make up a mere 4 percent of the population, but are responsible for close to a quarter of emissions." He adds that the average American is responsible for double as much carbon dioxide as the average European. "The Bush government rejects international climate protection goals by insisting that imposing them would negatively impact the American economy. The American president is closing his eyes to the economic and human costs his land and the world economy are suffering under natural catastrophes like Katrina and because of neglected environmental policies."

"Solomonia Interview: Richard Landes" (Martin 'Solomon', Solomonia, 2005/08/30)
"Boston University History Professor Richard Landes discusses his new media watch-dog project, the performance of the press, the rise of anti-Semitism, Pallywood, and more":
"S: What is Pallywood?
L: It's a play on the expression Bollywood, the designation of India's film industry, based in Bombay. It identifies a practice among Palestinian journalists to turn staged drama into news. This fictional news industry then feeds Western news reporting, who don't seem to suspect they're being duped.
The expression acknowledges that the active, if still young, film industry of Palestinian culture, especially since the advent of cultural autonomy with the Oslo Accords in 1993, has already made a distinctive contribution to global culture.
S: Isn't the expression disrespectful...mocking?
L: On one level, not at all. Most national film industries would love to have the success in the larger world media that Pallywood has achieved. Pallywood is a distinctive and powerful national product. But on the other hand, because it identifies Pallywood as part of a campaign of disinformation and propaganda, why should we respect that, rather than criticize it? As for mocking, at a basic level Pallywood is a joke played by the Palestinians on the West, and one can see it in the smiles on the faces of by-standers as they walk away from these staged scenes.
S: So you'll be posting raw footage for visitors to view for themselves? Visitors to the site can see the "rushes" from which their news was prepared?
L: Yes. We'll post the raw footage from Palestinian cameramen working for major Western news agencies at Netzarim Junction on Sept. 30, 2000 and possibly the next day. The visitor can view these videos for themselves and start to form their own impressions, then they can hop in and start reading our analysis and participating in the ongoing discussion. They'll have the chance to form their own impressions first.
It'll be like having a look behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz."

"Jihadism's roots in political Islam" (Bassam Tibi, International Herald Tribune, 2005/08/30)
"After any terrorist attack by jihadists - from the Sept. 11 attacks to those in Bali in 2002, Madrid in 2004 and London in July - two contradictory views are usually heard. Some people claim that such religiously legitimated terror has its roots in Islam; others, principally Muslims and politically correct Westerners, say such terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.
The truth can only be reached by putting aside both extreme views and by recognizing the difference between Islam, the religion, and Islamism, the religious-political ideology. Although jihadism may not be Islamic, it is based on the ideology of Islamism, which has emerged from the politicization of Islam in the current war of ideas.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of recognizing this truth. Jihadism will continue to be with us for decades to come, as long as the movement related to it within Islamic civilization continues to thrive and to disseminate its deadly ideas.
Jihadists see themselves as non-state actors waging an irregular war against "kafirun," or unbelievers. They see their struggle as a just war legitimated by a religious, political and military interpretation of the Islamic concept of jihad. ...
It is wrong and even deceitful to argue that jihadism has nothing to do with Islam, because the jihadists believe that they are acting as "true Islamic believers" and learn the Islamist mind-set in mosques and Islamic schools, including those of the Islamic diaspora in Europe.
It follows that the debate over whether these terrorists are "Islamic" or "un-Islamic" is meaningless. The fact is that jihadism is a new direction in Islamic civilization, an expression of the contemporary "revolt against the West" that enjoys tremendous popularity in the ongoing war of ideas."

"What If Syria Is Guilty?" (Michael Young, Texh Central Station, 2005/08/30)
Beirut II: "Late last week, Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor investigating the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on behalf of the UN Security Council, released a preliminary report on his inquiry, scheduled to be completed by mid-September. The Western media have given relatively little attention to the investigation; however, if Syria is found guilty, as many observers are beginning to foresee, this could lead to the destabilization of Syria's regime, if not to its actual downfall.
The preliminary report did not address the substance of what Mehlis and his team had found, though it did offer details allowing for some educated guesses. For example, the prosecutor, while admitting that further interviews of witnesses might extend the three-month deadline of his report (renewable for one additional three-month period), nevertheless mentioned that he expected his work to be completed on time. This may indicate, as sources close to the Hariri camp have maintained, that Mehlis has already completed the bulk of his inquiry, implying he has found a guilty party or parties. ...
Mehlis also highlighted the fact that Syria had refused to cooperate with the investigative team, which had asked to speak to five Syrians - four intelligence officials who had held posts in Lebanon, and, the London-based daily Al-Hayat alleged last week, President Bashar Assad himself. Initially, the Syrians, citing constitutional clauses, had refused to allow oral interrogations, and asked Mehlis to submit his questions via the Syrian Foreign Ministry, so they could be answered in writing. When the UN rejected this, and after warnings were directed at Syria last week, even from friendly countries such as Russia, Assad backtracked, telling the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, in an interview published on Monday, that he would allow Mehlis to speak to Syrian officials after all.
If Assad is the "fifth man", then this would be particularly revealing."

"Security Personnel Held in Hariri Slaying" (Hussein Dakroub, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/08/30)
Beirut I: "Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said Tuesday that three former Lebanese security chiefs and the commander of the Presidential Guards are suspects in the U.N. investigation into the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
The prime minister confirmed that the three former security chiefs had been detained for questioning earlier Tuesday and that the Guards commander had been summoned to appear before the U.N. probe.
The commander of the Presidential Guards, Brig. Gen. Mustafa Hamdan, appeared before the U.N. investigation in response to a summons, the Justice Ministry said in a statement earlier Tuesday.
The chief U.N. investigator, Detlev Mehlis, met separately with the prime minister and justice minister earlier Tuesday. The Justice Ministry statement said the U.N. investigation had been granted permission to use the police to "carry out raids, searches and escorting of persons for questioning." ...
The detentions were the first major police action since Hariri and 20 others were killed in a massive bomb in Beirut on Feb. 14."

Added in archive:
"Polis" (Martin Peretz, The New Republic, 2005/08/25)
"The Intellectuals and Socialism: As Seen from a Post-Communist Country Situated in Predominantly Post-Democratic Europe" (Václav Klaus, klaus.cz, 2005/08/22)

Monday, August 29, 2005

News and commentary:

"Beslan mothers: Putin is culpable" (Fred Weir, The Christian Science Monitor, 2005/08/29)
"MOSCOW – Shamil Basayev is Russia's Osama bin Laden. Yet as Beslan prepares to mark the one-year anniversary of the school siege he engineered, many of the victims' mothers are increasingly laying blame for the September massacre not on Mr. Basayev, but on Russian authorities.
They are stoking controversy by demanding that top leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, stay away from this week's service to commemorate the 331 victims, half of them children, who perished in the Sept. 1-3, 2004, terrorist attack.
Their accusations have been fueled by leaks from two still-incomplete investigations, and evidence presented at the ongoing trial of the sole surviving terrorist, Nurpashi Kulayev. Both have raised sharp doubts about the official version of events. ...
Kulayev's trial has brought stunning revelations. Russian Deputy Prosecutor General Nikolai Shepel was forced to admit that "Shmel" flame-throwers were used in the assault, after local mothers found several launch tubes and submitted them to the court. Mr. Shepel insisted the weapons fired only fuel-air explosives that day, rather than the incendiary napalm grenades they are also designed to use, and thus could not have caused the gym fire that killed most of the hostages.
But Stanislav Kesayev, who heads an investigation set up by North Ossetia's parliament, says that traces of napalm were found by medical examiners. ...
Under pressure from the mothers, Russian authorities also admitted that two T-72 tanks fired several cannon rounds into the school during the battle on Sept. 3, but say they did not shoot at the gym where hostages were held.
Mr. Kesayev says that his local probe, which Russian officials have denounced as "illegal," has been unable to establish who was in command of the security operation at Beslan. "We can't even say who was giving the orders," he says. 'There is a general feeling here that Kulayev will be convicted, and that will be the end of it.'"

"Sunnis Protest New Constitution in Iraq" (Robert H. Reid, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/08/29)
"Thousands of Sunni demonstrators rallied Monday in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit to denounce Iraq's new constitution a day after negotiators finished the new charter without the endorsement of Sunni Arabs.
Sunni leaders have urged their community to defeat the charter in a nationwide referendum Oct. 15, saying it had been rammed through the drafting committee by the dominant Shiite Arab and Kurdish alliance. ...
At least 2,000 protesters assembled in Tikrit near the office of the Association of Muslim Scholars — a hard-line Sunni clerical group opposed to the U.S. occupation — carrying Iraqi flags and portraits of the former dictator.
"We sacrifice our souls and blood for you, Saddam," chanted the demonstrators. They carried pictures of Shiite clerics Muqtada al-Sadr and Jawad al-Khalisi who have joined the Sunnis in opposing the constitutional draft.
Sheik Yahya Ibrahim al-Batawi, an organizer of the protest, read a statement denouncing the "Jewish constitution," saying its goal was to divide Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines."

"See No Evil, Hear No Evil" (Stephen F. Hayes, The Weekly Standard, from the 2005/09/05-12 issue)
"Ahmed Hikmat Shakir is a shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.
When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact information for Musab Yasin and another 1993 plotter, a Kuwaiti native named Ibrahim Suleiman.
These facts alone, linking the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, would seem to cry out for additional scrutiny, no?
The Yasin brothers and Shakir have more in common. They are all Iraqis. ...
Why would the 9/11 Commission neglect Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, a man who was photographed assisting a 9/11 hijacker and attended perhaps the most important 9/11 planning meeting?
And why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention the overlap between the two successful plots to attack the World Trade Center?
The answer is simple: The Iraqi link didn't fit the commission's narrative."

"Rushdie dismisses Galloway's claims" (John Plunkett and Tom Service, The Guardian, 2005/08/29)
"Salman Rushdie clashed with George Galloway yesterday in a debate about TV and religion and a hypothetical small-screen adaptation of the novelist's controversial book The Satanic Verses.
Mr Galloway, MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, said TV executives had to be "very sensitive about people's religion" and if broadcasters did not show sufficient sensitivity they "had to deal with the consequences".
He said: "You have to be aware if you do [offend people's beliefs] you will get blowback. You should do it very carefully, especially if you are a public service broadcaster."
"Is that a threat?" asked Rushdie during the debate at the Media Guardian Edinburgh international television festival.
Describing Mr Galloway's argument as "craven", the author said: 'The simple fact is that any system of ideas that decides you have to ringfence it, that you cannot discuss it in fundamental terms, that you can't say that this bit of it is junk, or that bit is oppressive ... we are supposed to respect that?'" (Hat tip: Harry's Place.)

". . . and American Paralysis" (Robert Kagan, The Washington Post, 2005/08/29)
Egypt's Presidential election II: "For as it happens, Mubarak has not suspended the emergency decrees. The "rule of law," therefore, will not be in place as Egyptian opposition figures attempt to compete in an electoral system that remains entirely stacked against them. As for Rice's explicit demand for election monitors and observers, Mubarak has rejected that, too. At the moment it appears that there will be no independent monitors of any kind, foreign or Egyptian. ...
So do Egypt's citizens really have what Rice called "the freedom to choose" their rulers in this election? By her own "objective standards," the answer is no. ...
Perhaps there is concern that too much pressure on Mubarak might produce a victory by the Muslim Brotherhood, the most popular Egyptian opposition party that has been outlawed by the government. That's a risk, of course, but if the Bush administration isn't willing to let Islamists, even radical Islamists, win votes in a fair election, then Bush officials should stop talking so much about democracy and go back to supporting the old dictatorships. It was precisely that kind of logic -- that friendly dictators are preferable to potentially radical alternatives -- that helped produce so much radicalism during the Cold War and, more recently, a healthy movement of Middle East terrorists. Bush supposedly has rejected that kind of logic. But if the decisive moment in Egypt passes without change, many will ask what, exactly, is new about the administration's approach. Arab peoples watching carefully to see whether Bush is serious about his commitment to democracy will have reason to doubt that he is."

"Egypt's Potemkin Election . . ." (Jackson Diehl, The Washington Post, 2005/08/29)
Egypt's Presidential election I: "President Bush made one specific demand about the Egyptian election: that it be monitored by international observers. Mubarak flatly refused. A coalition of independent Egyptian groups seeking to observe the polls has also been denied access. Egyptian judges, whom the government has designated to oversee the balloting, are to decide this week whether to refuse the job, on the grounds that they have no means to prevent the rampant fraud that has characterized previous elections.
So the big picture looks bad. In Cairo, nonetheless, the campaign has been titillating -- even thrilling -- for the minority of Egyptians who follow politics. For the first time in half a century, after all, opposition politicians are holding public rallies without being attacked by security forces, and relatively harsh criticism of Mubarak and his government is being aired on national television. ...
So how will the inevitable Mubarak landslide on Sept. 7 be received at the Bush White House? Probably with a muted welcome. Bush can only be irritated that Mubarak rejected his appeal for observers, and it will be impossible to describe the election as free and fair. Still, officials here argue, in the Egyptian context, the events of the past several weeks are notable: After half a century of authoritarian rule, the regime founded by Gamal Abdel Nasser and once allied with the Soviet Union has been forced to acknowledge its obsolescence and accept, at least in principle, a transition to democracy.
Freedom isn't on the march in Cairo; at best, it's a slow crawl. But compared with the chaos in Iraq, maybe that doesn't look so bad to the Bush team. Or maybe there just isn't the stomach to insist on more."

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

 

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Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

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From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

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